If you ever doubt the irrelevance of most political events, look up the news from the corresponding day of the previous year.
On February 23rd, 2015, British broadcasters agreed a sequence of televised debates for the forthcoming general election. But would David Cameron show up? Labour's campaign director, Douglas Alexander, goaded the prime minister with an open letter. Journalists warned the "chicken" of Downing Street he could be ignominiously empty-chaired.
His debate-dodging was, they agreed, a reputational disaster. His eventual capitulation was a loss of face. His limp showing in the first episode testified to a dismal Tory campaign.
Cameron remains the prime minister. Alexander is said to be helping the singer of U2 with some good causes. Anyone who believes the debates and tactical particulars decided the election is trying very hard to pretend they did not waste a fine British spring.
They may also be excitable enough to think Boris Johnson's conversion to Brexit, announced at greater length than clarity by the London mayor on Sunday, materially improves its prospect of happening.
To be clear, voters like Johnson. But they like Judi Dench too. Liking someone and deferring to their judgment on a serious question are different things.
Being a national treasure and being trusted with the nation’s treasure are different things.
He is Britain’s best-loved politician, by a distance, but that only means so much until he holds an office that forces him into the same incendiary decisions other politicians make.
He has never had to raise taxes or deploy lethal force abroad. He does not have to tell people much they do not wish to hear, or take the blame for random failings across the kingdom the way a prime minister must.
Until he does - and the premiership, in one imaginable sequence of events, could be his before the year is out - the EU referendum campaign will have to serve as a proxy test of whether popularity begets credibility. We will learn if voters who love Johnson’s patter actually listen to what he says.
Brexit implies risk. It is not clear how the endorsement of a protean maverick eases that problem of perception. Theresa May, who probably tuts when she spies a clock 30 seconds out of sync with Greenwich Mean Time, could have brought stolid reassurance to the Leave campaign. But even the home secretary would have made no decisive difference. Because no individual, save the prime minister, possibly could.
The political class has learnt the square root of nothing from its misjudgment of the general election. It should have been a traumatic lesson in basic truths - that Cameron might be better at politics than a guy with a blog, for example - and also a turning point in the way we distil politics for a lay audience.
Breathless hyper-scrutiny of fiddly events could have given way to a discriminating regard for fundamentals. Opinion polls could have returned to their proper place as contextual information, not the story itself.
Instead, we still react to transient events like over-caffeinated children.
The politico’s error is to see voters as particles that are acted upon by political forces - as the subjects, not the agents of politics. If people are Eurosceptic, it is because politicians have not “made the case”.
If people are nervous about Brexit, it must be the lack of a dazzling frontperson for the cause. The sour focus on economic risk by the campaign against Scottish independence 18 months ago - just a tactic, and a successful one - is now blamed for a development as large as the Scottish National Party’s near-monopoly in that nation.
This is how intelligent commentators, grown adults with mortgages and dental plans, came to spend last spring advising Cameron to jump up and down a bit more and show voters he cared. This is why we dissolved into a puddle of excitement on Sunday, as if Johnson holds the same sway over modern Britons as Colonel Kurtz over his credulous Montagnard army in Apocalypse Now.
If you believe voters are blank subjects, you judge the electability of a proposition - in this case, Brexit - by looking at the people promoting it, their campaign tactics, the slant of the media coverage, contingent events, the wind-chill factor on polling day.
Everything but the proposition itself. Britons are being invited to exchange the lived reality of EU membership for a nebulous exit, envisaged by its most popular advocate as a way of gaining leverage over Brussels for a deeper revision of membership terms.
"In the next few weeks," wrote Johnson in his announcement in the Daily Telegraph, "the views of people like me will matter less and less." Believe him. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016